Israel's settlers One reason for the absence of peace

The Economist, 11.10.07. TWO months ago Heftsiba, an Israeli construction firm, went bust. One reason for its woes was a court order last year to freeze work on a big housing project on an Israeli settlement just inside the West Bank. The land, it turned out, had in effect been stolen from private owners in a neighbouring Palestinian village, Bilin. Yet after the bankruptcy, the same court ruled that the apartment blocks—and their prospective buyers, who had broken in and occupied them at the news of Heftsiba's impending collapse—could stay. And thus it has always been. Never mind that Israel has flouted international law by settling its citizens in occupied foreign territory; what is remarkable is how consistently the settlers have thwarted Israel's own laws, in pursuit of what to them are biblical lands inhabited by Palestinian interlopers. The Bilin case was just a variation on a tried and tested method: seize land illegally, establish hard-to-reverse “facts on the ground” and then legalise the claim retroactively through the courts or the government. The result is a West Bank so riddled with settlement that it is hard to see how enough can be removed for a viable Palestinian state to emerge.

In this thorough and eye-opening book, Idith Zertal, a historian, and Akiva Eldar, a journalist, explain how a few tens of thousands of people bent the state to their purpose. Settlements were not on the official agenda after Israel's surprise capture of the Palestinian territories in 1967. But pressure from ardent young religious Zionists found a secular echo among military men, who came to see security benefits to having Israelis live in the West Bank.

Such confluences of interests were what drove the settlements' spread. Only rarely, when a new outpost was too blatantly illegal and too plainly of no strategic use, did the apparatus of the state contrive to force a retreat. With politicians constantly interfering on behalf of the settlers, the army's effectiveness against law-breakers soon bled away.

Over the years, official attitudes evolved. The Labour governments that ruled until 1977 turned a blind eye to expropriations of land for “military” use that then became civilian. The more right-wing coalitions that followed embraced settlements openly, devising ingenious legal veneers. Since the 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords, Israel has avoided building “new” settlements via administrative tricks that expanded existing ones, though it has also ignored innumerable violations. Whatever the government in power, the settlers' genius was in exploiting its weaknesses and co-opting sympathetic officials.

The authors' anger falls mainly on the religious pioneers and their secular allies, especially Ariel Sharon, whose removal of settlements from Gaza in 2005 was, they argue, no more than a way to consolidate the hold on the West Bank. But nobody escapes blame. Shimon Peres, Israel's elder statesman, emerges as one of the settlers' most useful early helpmates. Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians' former leader, and Mahmoud Abbas, their current president, were still exiles in Tunis when they negotiated the first Oslo accord and had no idea how settlements had permeated the West Bank. To the horror of their local advisers, they agreed to no more than a token constraint on settlement growth. Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who signed Oslo and whom the authors plainly admire for hating settlers almost as much as they do, gets a lashing for presiding during one of their fastest rates of growth and being in a “state of denial” about their influence.

That denial had much to do with an inability to grasp how different religious Zionism, with its messianic belief that Israel's creation hastened Redemption, was to Rabin's traditional, secular-nationalist sort. For the true believers, constant war with the Arabs was essential to avoid “assimilation [of Jews] into the Semitic expanse”. The costs of this ideology to Israel, let alone the Palestinians, have been enormous. Rabin's assassin in 1995 was inspired by a settler, Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994. Goldstein's rampage, according to a former adviser to the head of Israel's security service, also prompted Hamas to begin the tactic of suicide-bombings against Israeli civilians.

And yet, the authors conclude, traditional Zionism must take a share in the blame. It was the aggressively secular early state of Israel that repressed religious Zionism in the first place, setting the stage for its violent revival, and for the dichotomy in Israel's nature that it has yet to resolve.

Blair of Arabia

From The Economist print edition. 26/07/07. Nothing about the latest diplomacy is plain. None of those involved—Mr Olmert, Mr Abbas, moderate Arab leaders, George Bush and even Mr Blair—seems likely yet to have the will or the courage to tackle the explosive issues (the division of Jerusalem, the removal of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, redrawing borders or addressing the refugee question) that have prevented a lasting peace before. Welcome, Mr Blair, to the snake pit.

Tony Blair has been in the job for less than a month since retiring as Britain's prime minister, and is already feeling the slashes of the sword. The first swipe came from Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany's foreign minister, who complained that Mr Blair had been appointed behind closed doors by America without consulting the so-called quartet—the club of America, Russia, the European Union and the UN—that Mr Blair is now supposed to represent.

Then came an “open letter” from ten of Europe's Mediterranean countries, which said his mandate, to help build the institutions of a future Palestinian state, was too limited. Mr Blair, they said, should tear up the quartet's old “road map” and seek an all-inclusive peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Americans, though, insist that Mr Blair's authority will not extend to high diplomacy. They will lead the way along the “political track”, says Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state. Italy told Mr Blair not to isolate Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules the Gaza Strip, but Israel says that is precisely what he must do. Merely by taking the job, Mr Blair has stepped on the toes of all the other Middle East envoys, not least Michael Williams, the UN envoy, and Javier Solana, the EU's foreign-policy supremo. His first foray to the Middle East as envoy this week—with a staff of two, no permanent office and relying on the help of British diplomats [...]

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Who's in charge?

From The Economist print edition. GAZA, NABLUS AND RAMALLAH. 19/07/07. At the al-Awda sweet factory in central Gaza, the owner, Manal Hassan, says he is employing only a third of his usual staff of 370, and for less than half the week. But frequent border closures in the past few years have taught him to keep three months of stock; he is happy that Hamas has taken control. “Before, when I went to the bank, I needed to be surrounded by gunmen,” he says. “Now it is safer. I would rather have no money and be safe than have money and be in danger.” Down in Gaza, Hamas has its own problems. Only a few hundred of the 17,000 police are showing up for work, under orders from the government in the West Bank, which pays their salaries. Hamas militiamen are filling the gaps, and there have been cases of torture of Fatah men and attacks on journalists. Raji Sourani, a respected human-rights lawyer, condemns such attacks but says the Hamas leadership seems keen to avoid such “mistakes” and pins much of the blame on Mr Abbas. “How can you tell these people not to turn up for work? They are destroying an existing civil system.”

FOR years they have fought Israel; now it wants to pardon them. Israeli right-wingers were predictably furious at their government's decision to take 180 members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the militias loyal to the Palestinians' secular Fatah party, off its most wanted list last week. If they lay down their guns and behave for three months, it will let them move freely in the West Bank for the first time in years.

Most have signed up, though some, like Nasser Abu Aziz, a beefy militant from Nablus, the West Bank's biggest city, who sports a neatly trimmed beard, a commando-style woollen cap and a new-looking M16 rifle, are holding out for something more—possibly promises of jobs from the Palestinian Authority (PA), where many of them once worked in the security services. Fayez Tirawi, a comrade of Abu Aziz who is not on the amnesty list, is more pragmatic. He doubts that Israel will abide by the deal, but is convinced that it is the only way to give Mahmoud Abbas, the PA's president and Fatah boss (pictured above), a chance to prove his claim that he can bring order to the West Bank.

Mr Abbas is not doing this just for Israel. Some self-styled “wanted militants” are, says Shawan Jabareen, director of the al-Haq human-rights centre in Ramallah, “mafiosi” who use patriotism as a cover for crime and extortion. If Mr Abbas can use the amnesty as a first step to bringing these and other gunmen to heel, it will cement his authority in the West Bank. After last month's showdown between Fatah and Hamas left Fatah running the West Bank and the Islamists of Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip, he must convince Palestinians that Fatah can do a better job than Hamas. But these are fragile times. Israel's army still makes near-nightly raids in Nablus and other towns, killing and arresting suspects. If it accidentally kills someone on the list, all bets will be off.

Fragile times, but also strange times. Men like Mr Tirawi are now readier to co-operate with Israel, which has occupied the West Bank for 40 years, than with Hamas, many of whose men they once counted as brothers-in-arms. When he accuses the Islamists of “collaborating with Syria and Iran” and “destroying the national project”, he sounds more like George Bush, who in a speech this week said Hamas was more “devoted to extremism and murder than to serving the Palestinian people”.

Mr Bush says he wants to “boost” Mr Abbas. In his speech, originally scheduled to commemorate the much-trumpeted “vision of two states” he announced five years ago, he promised Mr Abbas $270m in aid, a loans programme for Palestinian businesses and an “international meeting” on the conflict which may well be just a special session of an already-existing foreign donors' forum. Its time and place have yet to be announced.

But that boosting does not include what even the most moderate Palestinians insist is necessary to make Mr Abbas credible at home: some prior commitments by Israel towards the creation of a Palestinian state. The goals that Mr Bush set each side are similar to those of the long-dormant “road map” towards peace, which leaves those issues to the end. Noticeably, the Palestinian obligations (such as rounding up terrorists) were “musts”, while Israeli ones (such as stopping settlement-building on the West Bank) were “shoulds”, prompting Israeli pundits to comment that Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, need fear no pressure from the Americans.

Mr Abbas, however, is feeling it intensely. The interim government he appointed after the Fatah-Hamas showdown is trying to impose order on the streets and bring the PA's institutions back to life after a year-long aid boycott during Hamas's reign, all while it is in a legal limbo. Parliament must ratify the government but more than half of Hamas's MPs are in Israeli jails and the rest refuse to turn up to vote, so there is no quorum. Early elections, which Mr Abbas has called for, are impossible without Hamas's consent.

Mr Abbas may be trying to manoeuvre the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the worldwide umbrella body (of which he is also chairman), into holding elections for its own representative council for the first time in a decade, perhaps in an attempt to override parliament. He has also signed decrees extending military courts' power and giving the interior ministry the right to close down non-governmental organisations without a court order, measures that Mr Jabareen compares to other, more repressive Arab regimes. It all adds up to a slow dismantling of institutions on which foreign donors have spent billions—with the donors' acquiescence.

Down in Gaza, Hamas has its own problems. Only a few hundred of the 17,000 police are showing up for work, under orders from the government in the West Bank, which pays their salaries. Hamas militiamen are filling the gaps, and there have been cases of torture of Fatah men and attacks on journalists. Raji Sourani, a respected human-rights lawyer, condemns such attacks but says the Hamas leadership seems keen to avoid such “mistakes” and pins much of the blame on Mr Abbas. “How can you tell these people not to turn up for work? They are destroying an existing civil system.”

Still suffocating

Meanwhile, Gaza's border crossings with Israel have stayed shut to all but humanitarian aid since the Hamas takeover. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, has given warning that Gaza will become “near totally aid-dependent” unless commercial trade resumes. A telephone poll in Gaza by Near East Consulting, a firm based in Ramallah, the Palestinian capital, found that Mr Abbas now enjoys nearly double the trust rating of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas man who was prime minister until Mr Abbas brought in the emergency government, and that if an election were held, Fatah would get double the Hamas vote. Some Fatah and other politicians in the West Bank say they see signs that Hamas is beginning to buckle, and may agree to early elections under public pressure.

At the al-Awda sweet factory in central Gaza, the owner, Manal Hassan, says he is employing only a third of his usual staff of 370, and for less than half the week. But frequent border closures in the past few years have taught him to keep three months of stock; he is happy that Hamas has taken control. “Before, when I went to the bank, I needed to be surrounded by gunmen,” he says. “Now it is safer. I would rather have no money and be safe than have money and be in danger.”